The implications of service virtualisation on the routing procedure in Wireless Sensor Networks

The proliferation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has driven the design of Virtual Sensor Networks (VSNs) which decouple the physical sensor deployment from the applications running on top of it. In this concept, the Wireless Sensor Networks are no longer deployed to support a specific service but are capable of collaborating among each other (even if they belong to different administrator domains or if they comprise of heterogeneous systems) towards realizing new services and applications. The design and development of VSNs are at the focus of the VITRO project which currently develops a reference architecture [1] to enable the realization of scalable, flexible, adaptive, energy-efficient and trust-aware Virtual Sensor Network platforms. In this paper, we investigate the requirements that virtualization imposes on the routing procedure of the involved WSNs. Given that the routing protocol and the adopted routing metric affects the achieved quality of service, the support of different applications over the same WSN infrastructure mandates a)traffic handling differentiation from the routing protocol and b)proper coordination of the involved resource controller and VSN configuration management modules.